In order to achieve fat-loss, you must be in a calorie deficit.
This means eating fewer calories than you need to maintain your current weight. This puts your body in a situation where it will first use easily available energy and then turn to fat reserves for any more energy that is needed.
Eating fewer calories means eating differently than you currently do. This requires making some changes and change can be uncomfortable. You may experience hunger, cravings, frustration, fatigue, and other physical and emotional feelings.
If you are accustomed to eating the first moment you have those feelings, change can be quite uncomfortable and very challenging at first. Your brain and body haven’t found ways to get through it or realized the feelings you’re having will diminish.
Being hungry isn’t an emergency even though we may have let our brain fall into a pattern of thinking that it is.
So how do you get through the discomfort?
There are several strategies to help break the pattern and avoiding the discomfort. They fall into 3 basic categories:
- Substitutions.
- Distractions.
- Acceptance.
Substitutions can be used as a great first step toward change, and it’s exactly what it sounds like.
Craving a sweet treat? Have a lower calorie alternative instead like a sugar-free option, gum, fruit, or drink a large amount of water or zero-calorie drink.
Alternatively, go for something entirely different like fresh veggies, jerky or a protein shake.
Be mindful of calories.
The whole point is to eat fewer calories. If you end up substituting a 200-calorie cookie for 250 calories worth of almonds or 300 calories of yogurt with granola, you didn’t make any headway in the calorie deficit department.
It is just as easy to overeat “healthy” foods.
A substitution doesn’t break the pattern of reacting to an uncomfortable feeling, but it is a first step toward lowering your caloric intake and making some changes.
Be realistic and don’t expect the substitution to be as good as the thing you are craving. However, a substitution might get you out of the habit of always indulging in the original. If you go in knowing that then you will be ahead of the game.
Don’t expect a sugar-free, gluten-free, vegan option to taste like the original. It won’t. Accept it. Get over it.
Distractions are another strategy to get through some of the discomfort of change toward fat-loss.
Feeling hungry?
Get busy doing something else. Be creative, get artsy, read, write, organize, clean, run errands, fix something, do something for someone else, change your environment and go for a walk.
If you engage yourself with something else, it is easier not to obsess about how you are feeling in the moment.
Hunger does always pass, yet you don’t have to eat to make it go away. It may take 20-40 minutes, but it will subside.
The last strategy, acceptance, is the most powerful and can be used by itself or in combination with substitutions and distractions.
Accept the fact that you are feeling uncomfortable with hunger, cravings or another sensation and recognize that IT IS OK.
If we spend all our energy fighting those feelings and wishing it were different, change will be a long, miserable road.
If we accept that this is what we need to do for the change that we want, we can learn to sit through the discomfort.
With a little practice, you’ll realize that the discomfort isn’t nearly as bad as what you trained your brain to think of it.
You can take the acceptance approach while also substituting with a lower calorie food or using distractions to keep busy doing something else.
In fact, I’m hungry right now as I write this (distraction), but I know that I’m going to wait an hour and half to make my dinner and I’m not going to have a snack. I’ve practiced this enough to know that my hunger is not urgent and I can wait. If I want to, I might have a decaf coffee with a little half and half instead of a bigger snack I might have had in the past.
At first, trying the strategy of substitution, distraction and/or acceptance might suck, but it DOES get better. Just like anything, it takes practice.
It’s also OK to mourn your old behaviors.
Maybe you used to always order the yummiest thing on the menu, or have a sweet after every meal.
Mourn it, and then move on.
Take a moment to remember your “why” and accept that things are different now and you want to change.